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Quotations about identity

Oscar WildeMost people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

 - Oscar Wilde

Tags:   identity  mimicry  opinions  

Charles de LintWe're so quick to cut away pieces of ourselves to suit a particular relationship, a job, a circle of friends, incessantly editing who we are until we fit in.

 - Charles de Lint

Tags:   conformity  identity  individuality  

Lao TzuWhen you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everyone will respect you.

 - Laozi / Lao-Tzu

Tags:   identity  respect  

OshoNobody can say anything about you. Whatsoever people say is about themselves. But you become very shaky, because you are still clinging to a false center. That false center depends on others, so you are always looking to what people are saying about you. And you are always following other people, you are always trying to satisfy them. You are always trying to be respectable, you are always trying to decorate your ego. This is suicidal. Rather than being disturbed by what others say, you should start looking inside yourself…

Whenever you are self-conscious you are simply showing that you are not conscious of the self at all. You don't know who you are. If you had known, then there would have been no problem-- then you are not seeking opinions. Then you are not worried what others say about you-- it is irrelevant!

When you are self-conscious you are in trouble. When you are self-conscious you are really showing symptoms that you don't know who you are. Your very self-consciousness indicates that you have not come home yet.

 - Osho

Tags:   identity  self  self-conscious  

Johann Wolfgang von GoetheHow can we learn to know ourselves? By reflection, never, but by our actions. Attempt to do your duty, and you will immediately find what is in you.

 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Tags:   actions  duty  identity  reflection  

Margaret DrabblePerhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.

 - Margaret Drabble

Tags:   identity  pleasure  

Johann Wolfgang von GoetheA man's name is not like a mantle, which merely hangs about him, and which one perchance may safely twitch and pull, but a perfectly fitting garment, which like the skin has grown over and over him, at which one cannot rake and scrape without injuring the man himself.

 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Tags:   identity  names  

James BaldwinDespite the terrorization which the Negro in America endured and endures sporadically, despite the cruel and totaly inescapable ambivalence of his status in this country, the battle for his identity has long ago been won. He is not a visitor to the West, but a citizen there, an American.

 - James Baldwin

Tags:   America  citizenship  identity  race  

John McWhorter...on the question of "identity," [woke mob] ideology requires non-white people to found their sense of self on not being white, and on not liking how white people may or may not feel about them. No one would wish this self-conception on their child when laid out explicitly in this way. The idea of it as progressive is false. It sits as a gloomy, illogical, and pointless burden upon the souls of people whose spiritual energy ought to be directed elsewhere.

 - John McWhorter

Tags:   identity  race